winding down to the valley of light
by egelantier
Summary: Fenrir and the king share the memory of Right-Eye's pale face, slowly morphing from dull resignation into heartfelt astonishment. They both know now that Right-Eye had fully expected to die there, abandoned and forgotten in the dark. [shirogane no ou]


"Stop, Right-Eye," Fenrir's king growls, trying to push his bodyguard back onto the pile of pillows. "Lay back, you need to sleep. I'm just going to the throne room, you don't need to get up."

"You shouldn't go alone," Right-Eye pants in response. His eyes are huge and dark in his sunken face, glassy with fever. "There's always some danger... And I'm your bodyguard, I just - I'm getting up..."

He does manage to resist the king's restraining arm, which is impressive, given how gaunt he is and how loudly his breath is still rattling in his lungs. It's been five days since the king found him and brought him back to the palace, and while Wolfgang swears the worst of the danger has passed, Fenrir is taking no bets on what's going to happen if Right-Eye's allowed to climb out of bed and wander the cold stone corridors, barefoot and confused.

At the very minimum, the wrath of Lady Isel, who's fond of the boy, will be upon them, and some things are just too horrible to contemplate.

There's no doubt in Fenrir's mind that, even if the king succeeds in talking Right-Eye into staying put, ten minutes after they leave the room Right-Eye will be up again and trying to follow them, his fevered mind conjuring images of some disaster befalling his "body." The boy has a worryingly one-track mind.

Fenrir cranes his head to look at the king's face, and sees that he's well aware; the king's lips are tightly pressed in anger and worry, for all that his hands, still on Right-Eye's chest, are careful.

Fenrir can't blame him for trying to leave, honestly. The courtiers and the ministers are beginning to make a fuss over his absence, and even somebody as lackadaisical as this impostor king knows that the more one delays dealing with state matters, the more they sour.

He also can't blame the king for spending the last five days in this room, at Right-Eye's bedside, gnawing at his fingernails while the boy muttered and twisted on the bed - or, obvious as it is, for blaming himself, even though in general Fenrir heartily disapproves of the king's dramatic tendency to self-flagellate.

* * *

It was the king's idea to act as bait once again, going outside of the palace with just a small contingent of guards in hopes of smoking out some people who were stirring up unrest in the countryside. And that idea worked perhaps too well, since when the inevitable ambush happened, the king had immediately been knocked out by - oh, the indignity! - a thrown stone.

With the king out of commission and the attackers out in force, if Right-Eye hadn't managed to rally the guards, by then all of them wounded and panicking, to go back to the palace with the king in tow, and hadn't stayed to cover their retreat, things would've ended up very badly indeed. And by the time the awoken king rushed back with the company of soldiers, Right-Eye had disappeared.

It took them too long to find him, Fenrir muses, amused by his own vehemence: it's been a while since he's gotten attached to people other than his immediate wearer, but there's something about Right-Eye that tends to make Fenrir easily rise in ire on his behalf.

It took them two weeks to find the conspiracy's hideout. The king, this time accompanied by the full company of soldiers, scoured the countryside for leads, chasing down hints and whispers of unrest, bribing and threatening his way through villages and towns with breathless urgency. The soldiers whispered among themselves that it was obvious that the poor royal bodyguard's body was in a shallow grave somewhere, with a mixture of cynicism and gruff regret, and Fenrir watched the king's mouth flatten and his finger clench on his knees, night after night. But the king stayed silent.

But they found it: a dank, dark, cold system of caverns, but a day of travel away from the capital. The soldiers took out the sentries without much trouble. Fenrir remembers the stony tension of the king's shoulders as he stepped over the still-twitching body of one of the guards, the rigid dignity of his steps into the cave. The king's fear, so well-hidden and so obvious to anybody who dared to look.

They fought their way through the dark tunnels and found Right-Eye deep in the heart of the cavern, chained to the wall by his neck, with manacles on his wrists and feet, badly beaten, starved into almost translucent fragility, wracked with deep, wet coughs.

Later on he said the kidnappers wanted to force him to make a public confession of the king's evil deeds, tell tales about the decadence and villainy going on in the palace, perhaps accuse the king of killing King Zoe. Perhaps it was an earnest demand, trying to salvage something from the failure of their mission. And perhaps, since it was enough to spend ten minutes in Right-Eye's company to know that he would never betray his king, it was just a pretext for torturing the man who cost them their real quarry.

Not a single one of those men walked away from the cave alive.

Even his wayward king, prone to thinking himself a monster, won't lose any sleep over those deaths, Fenrir is sure of it. Fenrir and the king share the memory of Right-Eye's pale face, slowly morphing from dull resignation into heartfelt astonishment. They both know now that Right-Eye had fully expected to die there, abandoned and forgotten in the dark. He did not expect, despite all the lessons he's already learned, for the king to find him, and to kill everybody who took him, and to kneel down to him, and to shatter his chains, and to touch his face with gentle hands. For the king to pick him up, distressingly easily, and to bring him out into the light.

In Fenrir's opinion, this quite confirms the general idiocy of human children he's been saddled with, but nobody asks for his opinion.

* * *

And right now Right-Eye is obviously five minutes away from fretting himself into another coughing fit and a relapse, and the king is three minutes away from shouting at him, and feeling guilty about it.

Fenrir's not looking forward to the moment when they have to deal with Right-Eye properly awake and realizing that it will be weeks before he's strong enough to as much as lift his sword, but for now it's a simple matter of fever and confusion - and, he guesses, logistics.

Fenrir sighs, and slides from the king's shoulder, landing mostly in Right-Eye's lap; both Right-Eye and the king shut up, staring down at him with identically ridiculous expressions.

"You still need to go through this quarter's tax reports, and to review the irrigation project," Fenrir tells the king, and heroically abstains from rolling his eyes. "Is there a reason you can't do it from this room?"

"...Oh," the king says; he's looking, mesmerized, at Right-Eye's stick-thin fingers burying themselves in Fenrir's pelt.

The indignities one has to bear for the sake of peace, Fenrir thinks, and most definitely does not arch into the soothing motion.

Right-Eye is watching his fingers in Fenrir's fur too, his mouth opened in a small perfect O and his eyes glazed over and suspiciously shiny. "So soft," he whispers, reverently, and Fenrir sighs again and arranges himself for a long afternoon.

The king finally tears his eyes away and goes to the door to shout to the servants; Fenrir has to nip Right-Eye's index finger in admonition, to stop him from trying to rise, before the boy sees that the king is not trying to leave the room.

A harried attendant brings over the reports; the king has to bodily push him out from the room to stop the man from staring at the tableau Right-Eye presents, petting Fenrir's fur with the same concentrated attention that little Ully must've shown to some disdainful palace cat, back in another lifetime. By tomorrow, Fenrir thinks with another sigh, the palace will be in a frenzy of rumors.

But when the king comes back and makes a seat for himself and his pile of work by Right-Eye's bed, making sure to stay in his bodyguard's line of sight, Fenrir can feel the boy's entire body relax.

"I'm not going anywhere," the king says, softly. For a while, there's nothing but the scratch of his quill against the paper, the warmth of the late afternoon sun creeping through the room. The fingers in Fenrir's fur move slower and slower, and finally still; Right-Eye is asleep, head tilted back against the pillows, his mouth half-open, his face soft and young and serene.

Fenrir watches the king watching Right-Eye, watches the same softness creep into his features, unknot his shoulders. There are only the three of them here, and the palace is quiet and still around them, guarding their peace.

Worth it, Fenrir decides, and closes his eyes.


End file.
